Of Interest

Bravely wading through any number of potential pot-kettle issues, Gentlemen’s Quarterly presents to its readers a feature for the ages: “America’s 25 Douchiest Colleges.” You can see it here on GQ’s Web site in all its glory, or to get a look at how it ran in the magazine, check here.

The question isn’t whether you’re a douche bag when you go to college. We were all kind of douche bags when we went to college, if we’re going to be honest about it. No, the question for America’s youth is: What kind of douche bag do you aspire to be?

First of all, speak for yourself, GQ. Second, um, what? Most folks aspire to no such thing. (As always, there are some exceptions.)

Third, at the very least they got it right. Trinity cracks the list at No. 21, but the kicker is Amherst at No.7, though the rationale doesn’t exactly do us any favors.

Home of: The “I Went to a Small liberal-arts College in Massachusetts” DoucheAffectations: Quiet sense of superiority; intense desire to be surrounded by 1,700 people almost exactly like you; Choate soccer jacket.In ten years, will be: Smart policy guy at State Department that no one listens to.Douchey mascot: Lord Jeffrey Amherst.Problem with douchey mascot: Distributed smallpox-infested blankets to Native Americans.

Hmm. Good form on the bioterrorism reference, I suppose. The cynics among us may claim that this is simply a name recognition problem for Williams, but I like to think GQ is ontosomething.

10 of the 25 most douchey schools in America were all-male colleges. Things that make you go, hhhhmmmmm…

———

I concur on the Duke rating. We visited Duke and it took less than 20 minutes for mom, dad, and daughter to all turn to each other and say… “let’s get out of here, this place is giving me the creeps.”

The Potemkin Village fake British gothic campus, built like a movie set by an ostentatious tobacco mogul. The deep sense of needing to be “just as good as Harvard…”. The students walking, eyes downcast refusing to even acknowledge a greeting.

It’s not a very challenging task. I you click the magazine article link, all 25 schools are shown at one time. Counting to ten doesn’t take very long!

As for percentage of the 4000 US colleges that were once all male, that would take too long for me to figure out. I’ll see if there’s a list somewhere. It would be a fairly small percentage as single sex schools mostly went out of favor when higher education branched out from the northeast in the 1800s. The wave of land grant public universities that swept across the midwest was notable in the belief that college should be made available to non-elites and to women.

The author claims that in the mid-60s (just before the end), there were only 250 all-male colleges left in the country.

Once upon a time, not that long ago really, there was such a thing as a Yale man or a Dartmouth man or, closer to here, a University of Virginia or Washington and Lee man, each believed to be an identifiable subset of the male species. By the mid-1960’s, there were still almost 250 all-male colleges, heirs to a long tradition of male entitlement going back to the beginnings of higher education in America. But by the late 60’s, hammered by questions about their relevance, their fairness, their exclusivity and their reasons for existing, nearly all began to go coed.

Now, not counting seminaries and those few that share classes with women’s colleges, only four holdouts remain: Hampden-Sydney, about 60 miles southwest of Richmond; Wabash College, 45 miles northwest of Indianapolis; Morehouse College in Atlanta; and Deep Springs, a two-year college limited to 27 students in each class and located on a cattle ranch and alfalfa farm in the high desert of eastern California.

I believe that all 10 I’ve identified from the douche list were still all-male at the time of the 250 count in the mid-60s.

Well, really, have you ever heard a female described as a douche? I haven’t. It’s a male-exclusive epithet in my experience.

This is the real “hhhhmmmm” to me. What would gender studies make of this? Why couldn’t a derisive term be made from a less gender-specific word…like say…enema?

;-)

P.S. HWC, for what it’s worth, we had the same impression from our visit to Duke. We couldn’t quite put our finger on it, but in the spirit of body-parts and functions, there did not seem to be any tongue-in-cheek to the place.

Duke’s campus feels like visiting Stepford. Credit where credit is due: They’ve parlayed old man Buck Duke’s tobacco fortune into a huge endowment and an excellent university. It is, however, the definition of nouveau riche:

When, in 1924, Buck Duke made little Trinity the tenth richest university in the land (endowment today: $30,000,000), it was glad not only to take his name but also to let him reshape it to his heart’s desire.

Buck picked the site for his university (on Durham’s outskirts), decided its architecture should be Gothic, even selected the stone for its buildings, a greenish-grey rock quarried in nearby Hillsboro, which he chose because it resembled Princeton’s building stone. Buck directed that the campus should be dominated by a great Gothic chapel. When he saw the architect’s plans, he ordered them changed, the 210-ft. tower moved to a commanding position in front.

Not until seven years after Buck’s death was the chapel completed, but it fulfilled his wishes in every detail. A $1,000,000 structure, it looks like a cathedral (its tower was modeled after Canterbury Cathedral’s Bell Harry Tower), has 77 costly stained-glass windows, a 50-bell carillon. Off the transept is a memorial room in which Carrara marble figures of Washington Duke and Sons Buck and Benjamin lie in state. Below is a crypt for members of the Duke family. What Professor Blackburn fails to mention, but what no visitor can fail to see, is a ten-foot statue, smack in front of the chapel, of baggy-trousered, clod-hoppered Buck Duke, holding a big cigar (see cut).

I think Buck Duke’s ostentatiousness lives today in the spirit that propelled Duke to the top of the CQ rankings!

Fantastic post. Reminds me of my undergrad days, when one of the stars of the Amherst hoops team (who I won’t name, but was an incredible ciotch — even folks at Amherst thought so — which is a close cousin of a douche) was consistently taunted and psyched out by the Williams crowd whenever we played … even though there is quite a bit of overlap in the Amherst description, I think Williams’ totally-undouchey mascot (not to mention school branding overall — just compare fonts and admissions materiasl and so on, Williams just projects a more down to earth image) saved us from ignominy here :).

Maybe because I grew 20 minutes away from there, maybe because it is the only Ivy League school from which I’ve met numerous people who gave my puzzled looks when I said I went to Williams (really? seriously?), maybe just because it rings so true, I would put Princeton number one, easily.

Good call on David O. Russell Ben — if others need convincing, just google the video of his rant aimed at Lilly Tomlin — could even be the paradigmatic example of douchedom. Also, Amerst alum Scott Turow is a SUPREME douche. One L is one of the most self-aggrandizing pieces of BS ever written, and he was perhaps the most annoying speaker I’ve ever seen (full of insanely transparent false modesty).

This article pegged UChicago wrong — its description applies more to the business, econ graduate, and law school than the undergraduates or other grad programs. Not they don’t deserve to be called douches, just for different reasons …

Agreed that the Duke stuff is awesome.

Ken: Deep Springs, that has to hurt :). Although at least you get labelled a genius …

4000 universities? Give me a break. Since GQ isn’t going to be writing about how douchey “Western Kentucky State College of Lower West-Central Alabama” is, let’s talk about how many schools recognizable to the average GQ reader were coed circa 1950. My guess is that the number’s probably around 50%. Furthermore, I bet that if we were to take only the MOST recognizable 30 schools, that number would go up even further.

Also, the way you put it in your initial post was not that the list included 10 schools that were all male as of 1950, but rather, 10 schools that have at any point in their history have been all male colleges. If we re-do the above math, I would not at all be surprised if we will find the number of recognizable schools that have ever been all male outnumbers those that have not been. In other words, if we apply your words (“…ever been all male”) to the group of schools that GQ could potentially have included in such an article (primarily limited to schools the average GQ reader has heard of), I think we’ll find that in this context, there are remarkably many co-ed schools in that douchey mix.

There is little to nothing in DS’s history to support the assertion that being all-male was a choice “about distraction,” much less coming from “the girl in the halter top” (if you’ll excuse my quoting that bit of sexism).

I also had the pleasure of experiencing Deep Springs as a co-ed environment, if for only six weeks.

I’ve had the conversation many times– including with the Trustees– Deep Springs’ all-male status is old-fashioned misogyny, plain and simple.

Maybe because I grew 20 minutes away from there, maybe because it is the only Ivy League school from which I’ve met numerous people who gave my puzzled looks when I said I went to Williams (really? seriously?), maybe just because it rings so true, I would put Princeton number one, easily.

Also, the way you put it in your initial post was not that the list included 10 schools that were all male as of 1950, but rather, 10 schools that have at any point in their history have been all male colleges. If we re-do the above math, I would not at all be surprised if we will find the number of recognizable schools that have ever been all male outnumbers those that have not been.

Maybe if we talking about recognizable to alumni of all-male boarding schools in New England.

As for the vast majority of the country, the schools people know have been coed for a very long time. The University of Michigan began enrolling women around 1870. The University of Georgia in 1903 for summer school, 1918 for regular undergrad admissions.

I’m not completely sure that I follow your point. If your point is that large numbers of elite east coast schools discriminated against women until late in the 20th century, I would agree with that. Whether or not the gender discrimination of these schools is, in some way, correlated with their perceived “douche-ness” is a topic for consideration. It’s, at least, a plausible hypothesis as many “douche-y” characteristics were born from the all-male traditions of these schools (eating clubs, for example). It’s, at least, plausible that some of these schools would be less “douche-y” today had they stopped banning women a hundred years earler.

1) I actually have nothing against Duke. I thought the whole meme was funny, and it probably would have been funny no matter what school they used. (Harvard would have been funny, for example). I was recruited by Duke for track out of high school and one of my best friends, who I met after Williams, was finishing up at Duke when I was in Charlotte and I had some good times there when I visited. Though I did run into the biggest douchenozzle from my class at Williams one time when I was visiting my buddy — he was at Duke Law, so take that for what it’s worth.

2) I want to congratulate ce for leaving the douchiest comment in a post about douchery — nothing like an absolutely unnecessary dig at state universities (with absurd made up names because, you know, that shit’s FUNNY!) to make a larger point douchetastic.

First of all, I’m just talking about recognizable with the GQ readers audience. Why? Because GQ is not going to write a story about how douchey the University of Cape Town is if they don’t think that anyone in their audience has heard of it / cares if it is douchey or not. Possibly that audience is more composed of alumni of all-male boarding schools in New England than what an average US microcosm would be. It would make sense, given the relative number of males reading GQ.

Second of all, regardless, even if GQ was writing for a representative microcosm of America (it’s not), the most recognizable schools of that demographic will STILL tend to lean towards the once all-male. Ask the “average American” to name the 10 “most recognizable” schools, and they’re likely going to give you a list including (most but not all of:) Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Duke, Stanford, Notre Dame, and likely a number of flagship state schools (U of M, Ohio State, etc). Ask them to expand the list to 20 and your chances of having the aforementioned private schools (as well as a number of others like Columbia, NYU, Cornell, Brown, and USC) go way up.

My point is that GQ’s list will NECESSARILY be tilted towards schools that were at one time all male (as both University of Michigan and UGA were) because those schools are disproportionately recognized by GQ’s reader audience (and the general US population as a whole). Given this almost certain bias, you cannot look at that list, see a lot of once all male colleges, and draw the conclusions that you’ve drawn.

hwc, I’m not sure that I follow YOUR point. Are you saying that admitting women has decreased the academic quality of today’s schools? Your logic seems to me to be as follows: Whether a school admitted women years ago has a significant influence on that schools’ qualitative factors today. Given that the vast majority of today’s elite schools were at some point in their history all-male, we can conclude that this must be why these schools are so great. Furthermore if we look at the specific dates that these schools went co-ed, we discover that those schools that went co-ed latest (ie: after the 1950s) include the majority of the very most elite schools in our country. Given the direct correlation between these two factors, we can imply a direct causation; women have ruined our universities. Oh! I’m sorry. Did I deliberately misunderstand you?

Given this almost certain bias, you cannot look at that list, see a lot of once all male colleges, and draw the conclusions that you’ve drawn.

I didn’t draw any conclusion. I pointed out that 10 of the 25 “douchiest” colleges in America are formerly all-male colleges. At the same time, others were discussing the obvious gender issues surrounding the term “douche” used as a term of disparagement. I don’t pretend to know what it all means.

I do disagree with the schools that you think most Americans have heard of. Where I am from, it would be the SEC schools, especially Georgia, Florida, Bama, Auburn, and Tennessee. Those are the schools they watch on TV every weekend. They wouldn’t know Brown from a parcel delivery truck.

I’m sorry. I rescind my conclusion but leave the point–that most of the best colleges in our country at one point were all male–out there. Better? Less of an asshole move?

Also, maybe people would name Georgia, Florida, Bama, Auburn, and Tennessee, but I would wager that virtually everyone where you’re from has also heard of Duke and Harvard. Besides, for better or for worse, GQ’s target audience is not “people where hwc is from.” Like I said, I do think that the average American will name 5-6 big state schools and a similar number of nationally “famous” private schools (like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Duke, USC, etc). The fact that people where you live have heard of Georgia in no way contradicts my point.

On the flip side, how many colleges were all-female back in (pick a year of your choice!)? Yet Vassar makes the list (and rightfully so). What implications does that have for the gender theory of douchiness. And are there any all-women’s colleges that should have made this list (perhaps instead of the University of Phoenix, which I think is only there for a George W. Bush joke.

Like I said, I do think that the average American will name 5-6 big state schools and a similar number of nationally “famous” private schools (like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Duke, USC, etc). The fact that people where you live have heard of Georgia in no way contradicts my point.

They would know of Duke because of the basketball team. They would know Harvard and Yale as schools for Yankee douches. Princeton? Maybe. My friends from Harvard and Yale didn’t even like to say where they went to college. Williams was good in that regard because they wouldn’t know to peg me as a douche unless they had heard of it, so there was little risk. Otherwise, they could just think it was like Valdosta State, only in western Massachusetts instead of south Georgia.

Now, it is quite possible that GC is a magazine written by and exclusively for “douches”. That’s entirely possible. I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t be caught dead reading it myself…

Nah, I think sophmom is right. The concept of being a douche is a male construct, applicable only to fellow males, which I suppose would earn GQ a spot on the list of all time douchey magazines, since the whole article is pretty darn offensive from a gender standpoint.

It isn’t that I’m offended. Let me just say that I grew up with a bunch of brothers, so my skin is pretty thick when it comes to language and a certain kind of humor.

But, I do find the roots of insulting language interesting (the gender part of it, the emphasis on body parts and functions etc.) and “douche-bag” is particularly worthy of curiosity, considering what it really is, and the misinterpretation it had to morph through to become the insult it now seems to be.

I’m sorry if what I said was intended as a dig at state colleges. It wasn’t meant as such in any way.

Now that said, I am being intentionally a jerk other than that :)

oh, and to respond to hwc: I think you’re not understanding me. It doesn’t matter why Harvard/Yale/Princeton/USC/Georgetown/etc are recognizable. Maybe all of the readers of GQ are douches. It really doesn’t matter. My point is that since GQ is not going to write an article highlighting 10 schools that none of their readers have heard of (at least, not this sort of article), their choice of “douchey” schools is restricted primarily to those schools their readers have heard of. Given that (for a number of reasons) the schools that GQ readers have heard of disproportionately have pasts of being all male, we should expect that the schools on the list would be disproportionately those that have had all male pasts.

PS I obviously don’t buy into the whole gender thing. I was just making a parallel argument to that hwc used to show how utterly idiotic he can be. Maybe I failed there.

I get it. I really do. The douchey magazine wants to write about colleges their douchey readers attended, so that automatically limits them to douchey colleges that douchey male alums attended, which in turn produces a list heavily populated by former all-male schools.

I got a chuckle out of the Vassar blurb, with a reference to a Vassar douchey guy dating a girl who might be a lesbian. Apparently the douchey writers at the douchey magazine aren’t that familiar with Vassar.

So that nobody gets falsely accused, I actually changed this one since I thought it was a simple typo (per my own estimation and then per nuts’s comment, since “douche” is not an adjective, and douchey is). This is the only one I’ve actually changed though, and I’ll avoid “fixing” things in the future. Sorry about that.

I’m still pretty confused as to why it’s “douche” and not “douchey” though.

I am terribly disappointed to report that while the American Heritage dictionary has a fine set of definitions and etymology for douche, there is no entry for douchebag. Anybody have an OED at hand?

My theory is that douchebag was a variation on the well established, and originally very gendered, term scumbag (meaning a used condom). Since a scumbag was unquestionably manly, a further degree of insult was accomplished by using a feminine version of a similar hygienic device. Thus, a douchebag was a despicable person who was sexually ridiculous as well. See, eg.: http://www.hotchickswithdouchebags.com/

The latest variation on this term of abuse is douchenozzle. I am not sure how to fit that into my grand theory of douchebaggery. I would appreciate any suggestions.

As you might guess, when one googles the word douchebag and all it’s related versions, one confronts a plethora of um…material, most of it not very educational.

However, here is a site I’m glad I found. It’s run by a group of interesting, educated women (see “about us”) and Ann Friedman’s “rambling ruminations on the D-word” is a funny, enlightening read. And, as befits this thread, there is even a reference to Vassar. ;-)

I knew that “douchebag” was an insulting term long before I knew its literal, sex-related definition. Same goes for most other swear words, whether sexual or scatological or blasphemous. I think there’s a linguistic point to be made here.

Great Feministing cite, Sophmom. Really smart feminist blogging is one of the great blessings of the internet.

My mom went to Vassar in the 50s, and she has told me about the book (quite the sensation on campus)… but not that part of the book. Her mother-in-law (my grandmother) was quite open to discussing, after a few sherries, about how the failure of the ‘miraculous swirling douche’ had caused herself to get pregnant on her honeymoon, which was a terrible disappointment. So the use of the term in that sense goes back to the 20s at least.

This is the first I have heard of peccaries being used for contraceptive purposes. Those Vassar grads are really too sophisticated for me.

To be honest, I learned a couple of things from Friedman’s riff, myself.

Your whole comment brings a smile, and a feeling of ‘my, how times have changed’. But the part about where your grandmother was willing to go, vs. what your mother left unsaid, reminded me of a recent moment between my son and me, when I brought up whether or not he knew of a certain version of the term *teabaggers*. At the time, I thought his wide-eyed blank expression was innocence, I now recognize it was more like that of a deer in headlights. LOL… mercifully, I said ‘never mind’, and walked away.